One thought on “Het land waar je nooit sterft”

My first response to this book was, "wow it sucks to be a woman in albania" but this is ornela vorpsi: [image error]even before I saw this my second response was "this woman is a little bit too full of herself", I mean really every man? every man? my third thought was "her grandmother is a terrible person". My fourth thought was "she is a terrible person" my fifth thought was "is her mother dead or not" my sixth thought was "this is sad" that is a lot of thought for such a tiny book. I read this [...]

Not sure what to think of this book. It was not what I expected at all. I thought it would be a short story about one girl, but instead turned out to be snippets of stories about several girls and their coming of age and how sexuality plays a role in their life. Apparently, women are only good for one thing and nothing else. A little sad, but I'm sure that is how it is perceived in so many different countries. I somewhat feel like the book as a whole may have gone a little over my head because I [...]

From the earliest pages of this book - in which Ornela Vorpsi recalls significant, if grim, details of a girl growing up in Communist Albania - I felt absorbed . Her voice was welcoming and convincing, even though I always felt that the details were being recounted - using obstinate, ironic humour - by someone who was both smiling and on the edge of vociferation. Vorpsi grew up at a time when Enver Hoxha - the strictest of European Stalinists - was in power, leading a regime which, he was convin [...]

Reading this book equals to trying to take off an old layer of plaster from a wall using some tin foil. Sure, if you scrub really hard, a few pieces of plaster could give way, but you know things would get better having a piece of sand paper. For "The Country Where No One Ever Dies" (TCWNOED for short) by Ornela Vorpsi is not a bad book overall, but it's wrapped in tin foil thus merely scratching the surface of an interesting topic - Albania in the 1980s - leaving you dissatisfied at the end. St [...]

Even during the height of Communism, Albania was an outlier, a dystopia seemingly little noticed by most of the world. Here was a country whose dictator, Enver Hoxha, broke ties with the Soviet Union because he believed criticizing and abandoning Stalinism was "revisionism." Having then allied the country with Red China, Hoxha broke that off when China began taking steps to reestablish diplomatic relations with the U.S believing that to be a betrayal of Marxist-Leninist principles. The impact of [...]

Short novella seemingly written as a sort of "fuck you" to the expat author's native country of Albania. This differs from other books I've read written by authors who lived in the former communist nations of Europe who condemn their governments and societies by having almost no empathy for the average fellow citizen/victims. This tone jumps out of the book from the first page:"Another consequence is fearlessness, although this might be caused by our people's flattened, malformed craniums - the [...]

A wonderfully, dry, Albanian novel. It's referred to as a novel, but it seems more a series of vignettes about a young girl in communist Albania. It works beautifully whichever way you think of it.I happen to love the dry, black humor of many foreign works and that's what was the best of this novel to me. Roughly the story is about a young girl whose father is in prison (it appears that he really is a political prisoner, although that is sometimes denied) who lives with her mother and her grandp [...]

Read my full review in Issue 2 of The Collagist. Here's the opening:Albanian life in Ornela Vorpsi’s The Country Where No One Ever Dies revolves around sex, communist rule, and—despite the book's title—death. The book is separated into titled vignettes, reflecting the fissured self of a young girl living among the ruins of reason. Constantly accused of being or becoming a whore and dealing with her father’s disappearance and imprisonment as a political prisoner, this protagonist escapes [...]

This English translation from the Italian (Originally published in French) reveals an unforgettable portrait of a nation in hiding from the world, from itself and its women. Told as a female coming of age story from the perspective of an evolving female character, the collection of vignettes reveals the condition of a people and in particular “the feminine” under a collective siege. I would read this again. Beautiful prose, full of rich layered meaning. Makes me hungry for more Albanian litt [...]

What an odd and strangely compelling novel: a series of vignettes, really, about an Albanian girl's childhood, in which the details of daily life become fodder for sometimes deadpan, sometimes extravagant judgments of her native land: "How they longed for tragedy! My whole wonderful country thirsted for it! It created tragedies out of nothing, just like God created us from a handful of dust" [p. 7]

Nicely written narratives, in a sharp tone, at times humourous, more time fraught, by identified and unidentified females, usually young girls, that give an impression of life in albania while it was a Communist country.

Great, and much more amusing than I was expecting. Then again, I don't know what I was expecting really. Seeing such a baller dedication and knowing you're probably going to enjoy the book before you even start it is always nice. I would like to dedicate this book to the world "humility," which does not exist in the Albanian lexicon. Its absence can give rise to some rather curious phenomena in the destiny of a nation. This part cracked me up, too:I sit and wait for the doctor to come back. When [...]

Another beautiful and tragic reminder of the excesses and devastating consequences of living through and then escaping totalitarian regimes, becoming an immigrant, losing your sense of immortality and also your place in the world. This time from an Albanian perspective which feels very close to home indeed. If you replaced the setting, this could very well be Romania in communist times. Another reminder of the impossibility of living in your country ravaged by the banality of evil of political r [...]

A lovely collection of (probably) linked stories - Vorpsi gives voice to the voiceless in a number of ways: to Albanians, forgotten by the world and silenced by the repressive regime, to women in a coarse society, to youth in a world where respecting your elders - no matter how unworthy of respect - still holds ridiculous sway, to the skeptical in a land where fealty to national principles is a must, on literal pain of death and ostracism (sometimes in that order).Some of the stories are mere wh [...]

This is one creepy book. Vorpsi's style of writing matches amazingly with the statement she tries to make. I never really knew about this history of Albania, until one of my teachers told us to read this book. It's so dark and horrifying, and the main character just gets sucked into this way of thinking: it's really amazing. I guess the most creepy part about it, is that you know it's not all fiction. Brrr

The starkness of the thoughts in this novel, and the sentences used to record them, perfectly reflect the starkness of the setting. Sometimes the adolescent narrator seems so dark, but at the same time this is life. A very interesting read. The child aspects of the adolescent voice were pretty subdued, but the narrator's adolescence was pretty subdued as well. This book was an odd one for me to come across, but I'm glad I did.

This little book is devourable to say the least. I was expecting a lot form it and it didn't live up to all of my expectations but it was satisfying none the less. It's not a traditional novel, it's more like short stories. I would have preferred a novel from it but you can't have everything.The themes within the book intrigued me (especially the emphasis on beauty and virtue) and the little Albanian sayings scattered through added a nice touch. And lake drownings! Overall, quite enjoyable.

I'd call it a quirky collection of short stories rather than a novel. Translated from an Albanian author, it's a sometimes shocking look at her childhood under Communist rule. Adults are frequently imprisoned and the children have no innocence left. It's sort of darkly comedic, but not at all funny. Certain scenes have been sticking in my head for a few days. It's hard to separate what's autobiographical and what's straight-up fiction. I'd like to know more about the female author!

Few times can I pick up a book by an unknown author and know it's going to be excellent. This one was so good I finished it in a day. Vorpsi has major talent and depicts that end of Cold War eastern European experience perfectly. Can't wait to read another of her works.

I started reading this one mostly because I'm not sure I'd ever read another book set in Albania. It's a short series of choppy, strung-together vignettes, and while the writing isn't thrilling, it's somewhat fascinating as a cultural piece.

This is one heck of a book. Every sentence reads like its a prose poem. There's no real narrative, but rather a series of events, set in Albania under the Enver Hoxha regime. It could have been a bit longer perhaps, but hey, I loved it.

I feel as if I've read this book a hundred times: a precocious young woman awakens sexually as she also awakens to the strange and mysterious culture and customs of her Eastern European country, all of which she recounts to us in a knowing, almost sarcastic voice.

I'm not really sure exactly how I feel about this book. It wasn't terrible but then again it wasn't all that great either. I felt like there wasn't really a plot and the different characters thing kinda threw me off a bit. I don't know what to say really. I'm just so confused